Miriam Bird Greenberg

Long ago I heard footsteps come to the door, and a man knocking. We’ve had an accident up on the road, can you help he pled at the unanswered door, and kept knocking. He might have been a thief but soon enough a woman’s howl lit up the night, and I put a knife in my belt. Around dawn I figured their fortunes might be worth change.

I passed three girls killing a goat, shotgun leaned up against a tree and the entrails spilling into a coil on the ground. It was hooked between the tendons of its back legs to a high branch that gently creaked like a dry hinge busybody aunties wouldn’t oil. Blood drained into a pail, you could smell it shifting with the air, and black flies landed in the shadows of things where the wind didn’t touch. I dreamed I was carrying a sack filled with animals, and it dragged blood in the gravel and stained my skirt hem, you could follow my trail to the county line where old men sat on the liquor store porch. One crooked his half-arm for the bottle where the auger had caught his hand. I dreamed I was in a new country rinsing livers under a spigot, and the men cracking black walnuts on a stone named my limbs like the weather, like none of us knew the same words. By the tree the girls and the goat were faltering, one squatted to sharpen her blackened blade on a strop, and the men on the county line leaned back on the heels of their chairs talking about anything, each other, spring weather, the long-haired boy scalped by a combine, and one of them swore you only plant beans with the moon in Capricorn otherwise the fields choke up with scrub juniper. One looked intently at his left palm; his right wrist uselessly brushed the woven seat of his chair. When a wind came, the screen door leapt up on its leather hinges which never creaked and slammed shut. Mud daubers in the muck by the spigot blew sideways around my ankles and up under my skirt, and inside I could hear the woman who lived with the liquor store proprietor cursing as she locked up the vanilla like she knew how to break the back of a ghost.

In the peach orchard in an old bathtub the children are standing someone in a bath of salt water, and one gently attaches electrodes to the nipples of the one in the bath. Out of the weeds runs one with a rescued battery from the old motor home, which they had gotten to rev its engine like the sad bleating of a goat. If, later, anyone asks how they learned to do this, in a striped shirt one will say,Oh,I was looking for science experiments in those old textbooks someone got from the library book sale last year.